Thomas Centolella

Thomas Centolella’s new poems register attraction, delight, expectations fulfilled and foiled, and moments of great feeling cherished and/or lamented. Employing the vividness of narrative without yielding to its linear strictures and overly familiar tonalities, many of the first-person protagonists are mysterious figures at once engaging and idiosyncratic, even outright eccentric. Often betwixt and between, neither here nor there, they are uncertain of actually getting anywhere. Almost Human documents the restive life-force incarnated in an endangered species—our own—and charts the movement of the self between spirit and human, recalling the idea, attributed to Teilhard de Chardin, that we aren’t human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.

Thomas Centolella is the author of four books of poetry. His awards include the American Book Award, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and publication in the National Poetry Series. He is also a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. His poems have appeared widely in magazines, anthologies, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He has been a visiting writer at many colleges, universities and literary centers and has taught creative writing in the Bay Area for 30 years, notably at College of Marin and in private Marin workshops.